


Company to foreign shores

by laughingpineapple



Category: Myst Series
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 20:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7947325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are all Gehn’s children, forged by his pen in his image: lonely and frail. A kind of kinship. Written and illustrated for Mysterium 2016′s convention booklet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Company to foreign shores

The book rests deep within Tay, in the roots of the great hive-tree.

Catherine grabbed it, out of stubborness and spite, as she made her way to the village to see her people off Riven before her home world’s death. Or stubborness, spite and a desire to save, to hold onto as many ties as she could grasp when she could not stop the ground from slipping from under her feet. To take one last thing from Gehn when Gehn had taken her land from her, rocks and sea which existed long before he put the first squiggle of ink on a blank page, and had steered it toward a path of destruction. So she took his Age, which he called his 233rd and whose essence once echoed in her dreams, but too far away for her to catch a glimpse of a name, and carried it to safety. The way one would carry home a stray.

Maybe she hoped to find a patch of native soil. A paragraph lifted from Riven, a line, the composition of cobblestones, a fragment of home kept safe under another sun in the same way that this place’s sister Age, Tay, was alien in all things except from the shapes in the corner of her eye.

Catherine hoped – this, she admitted to herself – to find its Descriptive Book and heal its fractures, to nurture it and make it bloom. Dormant seeds of white flowers were scattered on the cliffs. Gehn would never keep such a treasure on Riven, it had to be on the Age itself.

She found the safe. It had to be it. Its code remained out of reach.

All that remained were long walks under the mushroom-rocks’ shade, until the Age would die, as all of Gehn’s Ages die, eventually folding and crumbling under the tension that already strained its waters.

 

Years later, Catherine sits on a dark shore: it is time. She will remain by its side until it draws its last breath.


End file.
